Awful but cheerful

'I mean — cheese — you couldn't have come up with that by accident.' He felt warmer, he felt taller, he felt fate snuggling around him with a good, good plan. 'Cheese.' His tongue moved in his mouth especially deftly, as if each word were more than usually intended. 'But who would have thought to try and make it — who would have known how?'
    'I know, it's like bread dough with yeast, or meringues — especially meringues. Who on earth would have guessed that would happen to an egg white if you pummelled it enough?'
    'I think the correct term is beat.' While he thought, 'But pummel would do, I'm sure', he could really do nothing but think, 'There must have been a Lost Meringue Age'; that egg white looked so much like spunk, was so much like spunk.
    Spunk. There was nowhere his mind wasn't willing to go and he was so happy to follow it nearly scared him.
    I wonder what she sounds like when she comes.
    'The Meringue Age.' She patted his forearm quickly, approvingly. 'Of course, the Lost Meringue Age. An era of peace and random food experiments.'
    I will know what she sounds like when she comes. I will be there and I will hear her and I will see. I have to.
    But no harm done, only thinking.
   His eyelids had closed and he couldn't quite coax them back apart. Under her knee, in that curve, there would be sweat. And in between——